Pianist Joyce Hatto. Photograph: Jeremy Nicholas
For those of you who were following the Joyce Hatto scandal earlier this year, in which it emerged that an extraordinary catalogue of critically acclaimed recordings turned out to be rip-offs from other, often quite well-known, recordings, there's an interesting piece in the current New Yorker by Mark Singer. Singer, who followed the story as it tore through the delicate heart of the classical music world, decided to pursue the matter further and obtained an interview with Hatto's husband, producer, and general hoax mastermind, William Barrington-Coupe.
The picture that emerges of Barrington-Coupe and his wife - whom the majority are now more or less certain was in on the scam - is a poignant one, of a consciousness so cocooned from the hazards of truth-telling that there simply would have been no point in attempting to confront him directly. Singer is content simply to let the man spin his own web of self-contradictory half-rememberings, floating in a kind of parallel universe in which his wife really had lived up to her astonishing, misled, obituaries. On one occasion, Barrington-Coupe issues something like an admission of guilt:
"I can see why I've been criticized for what I've done. Apart from being unlawful, it wasn't right. I know I shouldn't have done it."
But following this brief flicker of candour, he retreats into the world outside of which he is presumably unable to go on living. In a particularly moving twist, he relates that when the hospital called him in to identify his wife's body, he took one look and exclaimed that it wasn't Joyce. Perhaps he somehow imagined her still busy in the recording studio.
The magazine's website also has some audio of Singer discussing the case along with illustrative clips from the relevant recordings.
